In a remote psychiatric hospital in Sweden, there is a man known as Thomas Quick who has been convicted of unspeakable crimes. Over the course of multiple trials, he would tell his brutal stories—of stabbings, stranglings, rape, incest, cannibalism—to almost anyone who would listen. Then, after his eighth and final murder conviction, he went silent for nearly a decade. In the last few years, though, he has been thinking about all he has said and done, and now he has something new to confess: He left out the worst part of all
August 2013
Part 1: Inside the asylum.
Sture Bergwall woke up at 5:30 a.m. this morning, as he does every morning, and at 6 a.m. he walked for an hour in the interior yard of the secure psychiatric unit at Säter hospital, his home for the past twenty-three years. He likes to do this every day, pacing a figure eight over and over again. Sometimes he listens to music, but more often to the morning news, eavesdropping on a world he was separated from more than two decades ago.
Sweden is the kind of country where being a convicted murderer in a secure psychiatric unit is not necessarily an impediment to having a Twitter feed, and Bergwall often tweets about these endless morning circuits. "Exercise yard reflections," he titles them. Small wistful poems about what you can see when this is your only physical access to the world beyond: the budding of a branch, the way fresh snow sits on top of the courtyard walls, the glow against the underside of the sky that he knows is from the lights of the waking town to the east. On a good day, he sees a nightingale.
Sture Bergwall is better known to most people in Sweden as Thomas Quick, the name he took not long after he arrived at this institution in 1991. Quick is his mother's family name. Thomas, he liked to explain, was the name of his first victim, a 14-year-old boy whose body was found in a bicycle shed, belt undone, trouser button ripped off, and face bloody. Bergwall was never prosecuted for that murder, because he was 14 years old when it happened, and by the time he confessed to it, the statute of limitations had expired. But he was later convicted in six separate trials for eight other murders, and the full number of murders he has claimed responsibility for is around thirty. That is how he became Sweden's most famous serial killer. "Sweden's answer," as he himself would later put it, "to Hannibal Lecter."
For a time it was a role he seemed to revel in, but then in 2001, after his eighth murder conviction, Bergwall announced that he was no longer going to cooperate with prosecutors and he was no longer going to speak with the media. He reclaimed the name Sture Bergwall and went silent. As his reputation swirled, the man at its center kept his own counsel. But recently he has decided to start talking again, and he has agreed to see me. I have come here to try and understand his story—an awful story about what human beings can do, and about responsibility and guilt, and about deceit and retribution, one that has lessons for us all.
To reach the secure psychiatric unit's visitors room, which is where Bergwall and I will talk, this is what you must do: walk through the security entrance, put your passport in a tray where it is kept by a man in a secure booth, go through a heavy metal door that is opened remotely, walk through a metal detector, go through another remotely opened heavy metal door, sit in a waiting room where a coffee table is littered with Swedish women's magazines, then go through two more locked doors, each opened with keypads. And there, at the end of this, is Sture Bergwall, waiting, smiling a little unsurely, a 63-year-old man with a short gray beard, barely a wisp of hair on his head, thick glasses.
Here, five doors from the free world, it is hard not to feel a little apprehension. There is an odd moment after I first arrive when the translator has gone to the bathroom and the two people from the hospital who will sit by the door as we talk are not yet in place, and so it is just myself and Bergwall, meeting for the first time, exchanging stilted pleasantries. He takes a seat on one side of a low coffee table—a position chosen, I later discover, because he doesn't like to see the staff who are monitoring him. I move toward the sofa on the other side of the coffee table. But then he overrules me. He gently taps on the chair right next to him. Okay.
So that's where I'll sit for the next three hours, my right knee a couple of inches from his left. Bergwall's lawyer, Thomas Olsson, will tell me later about his first visit here: He and his future client were ushered into a kitchen, and the door was locked behind them. "Having your first meeting with a cannibal in a kitchen," Olsson will note, "that's something to remember."
Today I have brought pastries, and Bergwall seems pleased about this.
"Ooooh," he says, and smiles. And then he begins to talk.
···
Part 2: Eight murders.
To understand who this man is—the man who was once Thomas Quick and is now Sture Bergwall—one unavoidable place to start is by looking at exactly what the person I am now sitting knee-to-knee with was convicted for. The accounts that follow are drawn from transcripts of police interrogations with Quick, and from trial testimony and written verdicts, and from his own writing in the garrulous Thomas Quick years, and from media interviews he gave to explain himself before his period of silence. Many of the details are very difficult to bear.
The first murder that came to trial, in 1994, was of a 15-year-old boy called Charles Zelmanovits. Quick explained how he and a friend, on the lookout for a suitable boy in November 1976, spotted Zelmanovits walking along the road late one evening, visibly distressed. (Friends would explain that he had become upset after things had turned out weirdly with a girl at a school dance.) Quick pulled over to offer him sympathy and a ride home. He asked to feel Zelmanovits's hands, and so Zelmanovits took off his gloves, and then Quick said he persuaded the boy that they should masturbate each other. They stopped at a logging yard—Quick's driver friend wanted to join in—but then Quick became angered enough at something Zelmanovits said that he held the boy around the neck until he was dead. After Quick played further sexual games with the dead body, they carried it into a forest. Quick had a knife and a saw. "He is controlled by a sexuality where specific parts of the body have a certain symbolic value," the trial verdict would explain, "and he knew which body parts he wanted." Quick would describe the way the body seemed to groan as he cut it, and the sweet odor that was released. He explained how he took one leg and at least one hand away with him in a gray plastic bag and covered the rest of the body with moss. A short time later the accomplice came to Quick and said that he was having suicidal thoughts. "Do it," Quick told him, advice the accomplice followed.
Sture Bergwall woke up at 5:30 a.m. this morning, as he does every morning, and at 6 a.m. he walked for an hour in the interior yard of the secure psychiatric unit at Säter hospital, his home for the past twenty-three years. He likes to do this every day, pacing a figure eight over and over again. Sometimes he listens to music, but more often to the morning news, eavesdropping on a world he was separated from more than two decades ago.
Sweden is the kind of country where being a convicted murderer in a secure psychiatric unit is not necessarily an impediment to having a Twitter feed, and Bergwall often tweets about these endless morning circuits. "Exercise yard reflections," he titles them. Small wistful poems about what you can see when this is your only physical access to the world beyond: the budding of a branch, the way fresh snow sits on top of the courtyard walls, the glow against the underside of the sky that he knows is from the lights of the waking town to the east. On a good day, he sees a nightingale.
Sture Bergwall is better known to most people in Sweden as Thomas Quick, the name he took not long after he arrived at this institution in 1991. Quick is his mother's family name. Thomas, he liked to explain, was the name of his first victim, a 14-year-old boy whose body was found in a bicycle shed, belt undone, trouser button ripped off, and face bloody. Bergwall was never prosecuted for that murder, because he was 14 years old when it happened, and by the time he confessed to it, the statute of limitations had expired. But he was later convicted in six separate trials for eight other murders, and the full number of murders he has claimed responsibility for is around thirty. That is how he became Sweden's most famous serial killer. "Sweden's answer," as he himself would later put it, "to Hannibal Lecter."
For a time it was a role he seemed to revel in, but then in 2001, after his eighth murder conviction, Bergwall announced that he was no longer going to cooperate with prosecutors and he was no longer going to speak with the media. He reclaimed the name Sture Bergwall and went silent. As his reputation swirled, the man at its center kept his own counsel. But recently he has decided to start talking again, and he has agreed to see me. I have come here to try and understand his story—an awful story about what human beings can do, and about responsibility and guilt, and about deceit and retribution, one that has lessons for us all.
To reach the secure psychiatric unit's visitors room, which is where Bergwall and I will talk, this is what you must do: walk through the security entrance, put your passport in a tray where it is kept by a man in a secure booth, go through a heavy metal door that is opened remotely, walk through a metal detector, go through another remotely opened heavy metal door, sit in a waiting room where a coffee table is littered with Swedish women's magazines, then go through two more locked doors, each opened with keypads. And there, at the end of this, is Sture Bergwall, waiting, smiling a little unsurely, a 63-year-old man with a short gray beard, barely a wisp of hair on his head, thick glasses.
Here, five doors from the free world, it is hard not to feel a little apprehension. There is an odd moment after I first arrive when the translator has gone to the bathroom and the two people from the hospital who will sit by the door as we talk are not yet in place, and so it is just myself and Bergwall, meeting for the first time, exchanging stilted pleasantries. He takes a seat on one side of a low coffee table—a position chosen, I later discover, because he doesn't like to see the staff who are monitoring him. I move toward the sofa on the other side of the coffee table. But then he overrules me. He gently taps on the chair right next to him. Okay.
So that's where I'll sit for the next three hours, my right knee a couple of inches from his left. Bergwall's lawyer, Thomas Olsson, will tell me later about his first visit here: He and his future client were ushered into a kitchen, and the door was locked behind them. "Having your first meeting with a cannibal in a kitchen," Olsson will note, "that's something to remember."
Today I have brought pastries, and Bergwall seems pleased about this.
"Ooooh," he says, and smiles. And then he begins to talk.
To understand who this man is—the man who was once Thomas Quick and is now Sture Bergwall—one unavoidable place to start is by looking at exactly what the person I am now sitting knee-to-knee with was convicted for. The accounts that follow are drawn from transcripts of police interrogations with Quick, and from trial testimony and written verdicts, and from his own writing in the garrulous Thomas Quick years, and from media interviews he gave to explain himself before his period of silence. Many of the details are very difficult to bear.
The first murder that came to trial, in 1994, was of a 15-year-old boy called Charles Zelmanovits. Quick explained how he and a friend, on the lookout for a suitable boy in November 1976, spotted Zelmanovits walking along the road late one evening, visibly distressed. (Friends would explain that he had become upset after things had turned out weirdly with a girl at a school dance.) Quick pulled over to offer him sympathy and a ride home. He asked to feel Zelmanovits's hands, and so Zelmanovits took off his gloves, and then Quick said he persuaded the boy that they should masturbate each other. They stopped at a logging yard—Quick's driver friend wanted to join in—but then Quick became angered enough at something Zelmanovits said that he held the boy around the neck until he was dead. After Quick played further sexual games with the dead body, they carried it into a forest. Quick had a knife and a saw. "He is controlled by a sexuality where specific parts of the body have a certain symbolic value," the trial verdict would explain, "and he knew which body parts he wanted." Quick would describe the way the body seemed to groan as he cut it, and the sweet odor that was released. He explained how he took one leg and at least one hand away with him in a gray plastic bag and covered the rest of the body with moss. A short time later the accomplice came to Quick and said that he was having suicidal thoughts. "Do it," Quick told him, advice the accomplice followed.
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